Fabrizio Fantini, Evo Pricing CEO, on Wwworkers Camp 2017

Italy, June 8, 2017

From Turin, London and Molise (from which place we brought 7 people to the classroom - I think it's a world record for this small region), I'll talk to you about Big Data and how we use data to create value.

In fact, all of the startup stories we've talked about have this in common: in the end, in order to make money they have to set prices and therefore they must define promotions and market conditions.

Here is how we have created a new alliance between man and machine!

Briefly, I’ll tell you my story in order to reference my path: I studied at the College of Worker Knights in Rome, then I did a Master’s at Harvard University and a PhD in Applied Mathematics. After that, I spent 10 years as an advisor at McKinsey. One of my dearest friends commented that I had passed all the most difficult tests, let’s say, of modern society. Yet then, 4 years ago, to the great surprise of my family, I decided to put myself back in the game, to start from scratch and to create Evo Pricing.

Evo Pricing was born from intuition: data is the new gold mine.

From data, you can create value, but by themselves they say nothing. You have to extract information from data. Here it is that Evo Pricing fills the gap between the way decisions are taken (that very often even today is an irrational and very traditional process), and the new tools and potentialities.

What does management do, in fact? It tries to make predictions about the future and then manage them to create value. We help them by adding to their intuition advanced tools - scientific, data-based tools - that help them to make more accurate predictions and so with this help to create value, to mature, to survive and to expand their own companies. I’ll tell you an extraordinary example of what we do, in order to make everything in this rather complex matter more tangible.

Think about fashion: it's an industry where sales forecasts are very difficult and it is very prone to volatile trends. Products have a very short life cycle, and therefore the data alone does not help to define for the items the amount of sales.

And then what did we invent?

In addition to the Big Data that considers weather, social media rather than historical sales data, we went to the shopkeepers, asking them to give us a contribution. We give them a purchase proposal every week suggesting how to allocate goods and they are free to change it. It’s an amazing thing for companies that do not trust their stores, do not trust their staff. We have demonstrated it, and demonstrated with a €1,000,000 margin per month, with a significant result that individual stores are very smart and are able to predict sales together with Big Data in a very effective way.

An achievement of a team of 21 people: we have grown a bit since this photo, we continuously hire people in Turin, from Italian university degree courses.

We believe in Italy, we believe there is great excellence here and we are struggling to find people. So, talking about new trends in work, data analysis and data science certainly is a huge growth sector, a great opportunity sector. Today we have two branches, one located in London and the other in Turin.

We like to be Italian but we must be international to help grow the company. We also like to help Italian companies to become more competitive and to find new ways to grow. After saying this, we believe a lot in building this new alliance between man and machine together.We believe they are the winning formula in the era of Big Data.